Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

On indulgence: prior to making a statement in relation to the floods in Queensland, I wish to express my condolences and those of my constituents and my family to all of the victims of the horrific fires that have occurred in Victoria. It is hard even to comprehend the tragedy and how this will affect communities for years to come. I have to say that I have admired the bipartisan support of this parliament and the way the Australian people have united to help their fellow Australians. I have admired the way this parliament has worked. It demonstrates that, when times are tough and we get these horrific events in Australia, we can work together for the betterment of our Australian communities.

I also want to thank the volunteers, the charitable organisations like the Red Cross, the churches, the military personnel, the doctors and nurses, the police and the emergency services. They must be witnessing things that are absolutely horrific. I admire the professional way that they go about their work and the expertise that they have. To all of those people, on behalf of the constituents of Maranoa, I extend our condolences and our deepest admiration for the work that they are doing.

I commend the bipartisan approach that we have taken as a parliament to say, ‘Whatever we have to do to help these communities and these families recover, we will do.’

Dorothea MacKellar’s My Country poem has been spoken of with respect to the firestorms in Victoria, the droughts in many parts of Australia still ravaging communities and the floods in Queensland. The floods affect the western part of my electorate of Maranoa, and that is what I want to talk about today. These floods have cut off communities for three to four weeks already and will for many weeks to come, because as we speak there is even more rain falling into the headwaters of the Diamantina, the Georgina and the Thomson rivers in the Lake Eyre Basin. The member for Mayo just said to me, ‘Can you send some water down to the Lower Lakes of the Murray?’ Unfortunately these rivers feed into the Lake Eyre Basin, and I am sure we are going to see Lake Eyre itself filled as a result of these floods. The Diamantina and the Georgina rivers have cut off the two communities of Birdsville and Bedourie for the last three weeks, and the water is still cutting off those communities from the outside world. I was talking to someone in the shire of the Diamantina only yesterday. She is new out there, having taken up a position in the Diamantina Shire. She said, ‘Well, we’ve been cut off for three weeks now and I don’t know whether I’ll ever get out of this place!’

We know that the floods in this part of Queensland are enormously beneficial. One great benefit from these floods—apart from the tragedy of the loss of life, the loss of livestock and the loss of fences—across the gulf will be the water that will replenish our rivers and, importantly, the Great Artesian Basin. A lot of the water that is fed into our Great Artesian Basin enters in the rivers and streams of Northern Australia, across the gulf. A moment ago I mentioned the loss. We talk about the loss of life and the loss of property, but there has been an enormous loss of cattle in the gulf and down through the Georgina and Diamantina rivers areas. I was talking to pastoralists there, and they said there was certainly going to be some loss of cattle. I have photographs in my office of cattle wading through water. Whether they can get out of the water is debatable. When floods occur out there, they nearly always have a chance to move them out into the sand dunes and into some of the high country. Some of this rain fell just so rapidly and with such intensity they have been unable to get out and move them in time. They have been able to get out in helicopters and see what is going on. They confront these sorts of floods from time to time.

To give you some idea of the enormity of the water that is coming down the Georgina and the Diamantina into Eyre Creek, I will say this. I was talking to David Brook from Birdsville. He had just flown up from Adelaide. An interesting contrast was that they were flying up in their light plane from Adelaide and they had to stop flying because of dust storms. They could not see and they were flying visual, so they had to land and they went on the next day. Some of this water that is going into the Diamantina and the Georgina will end up in the Goyder Lagoon, which is in South Australia. That is filling now. He said that Goyder Lagoon to Birdsville is about 150 kilometres on the old Birdsville Track and that 100 kilometres of that track is under water. If you look west from there, there is another 100-odd kilometres of water. There is a similar situation to the east and to the north, right up to Bedourie. There is almost a sea of water out there. It is filling clay pans and lakes that have been dry for years, but it is going to have a long-term beneficial effect for the community.

I want to touch on another issue, and that is services to those communities. These communities had an air service that had been subsidised by the Queensland government, and I commend the Queensland government and the Queensland minister on that. The service was provided by MacAir. They had been having financial difficulty for some time, and in the middle of all this they went into voluntary administration. That left these communities without any connection to the outside world, and the only connection was by air.

The Queensland government put in place a replacement for that service in the form of Skytrans but there was some suggestion that, until they were actually registered with CASA and their pilots had had licences approved, those communities may be totally without any service. It did cause some concern for me last week. I want to thank the office of the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government. They moved absolutely heaven and earth to make sure that the bureaucracy of CASA did not stand in the way of what had to be done. The staff were absolutely outstanding and I want to thank them for that. Within two days those licences were approved for some 26 services in Queensland, including across the gulf and out of Cairns and Townsville. These are services that are providing mail, food and medical supplies into the communities and also moving passengers. These services are the only way that those communities can get any of those services in. So I just want to thank the minister for that.

I would like to conclude by saying that as these floodwaters recede, as they inevitably will, during the course of the year it is going to leave across Northern Australia an enormous body of grass that will eventually dry off. As it dries off, it too will present an enormous fire risk in the future. So from the flooding rains to drought and the potential for fire to follow, this is part of what nature gives us from time to time. I know that my time is nearly up and that the member for Moreton would like to say a few words. I will allow him a couple of moments if that is what he would like.

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